If you are completely new to affiliate marketing, you will appreciate the overview, advice, and pointers. For me the book was way too basic and was not polished (lacking solid editing) like I expected from a book available on Amazon. It promoted a few affiliate management software products which felt salesy and out of place. I agree with the comments that the content switched back and forth between being an affiliate and running an affiliate program for your site. The book was OK and serves a purpose, so 3 stars is my review.
In the case of cost per mille/click, the publisher is not concerned about whether a visitor is a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission. This leaves the greater, and, in case of cost per mille, the full risk and loss (if the visitor cannot be converted) to the advertiser.

An influencer is an individual who holds the power to impact the purchasing decisions of a large segment of the population. This person is in a great position to benefit from affiliate marketing. They already boast an impressive following, so it’s easy for them to direct consumers to the seller’s products through social media posts, blogs, and other interactions with their followers. The influencers then receive a share of the profits they helped to create.

Back in these early days, the site was still called “Tom’s Hardware and Performance Guide” and its domain was sysdoc.pair.com — pair.com being a Pittsburgh-based hosting company. Today’s domain, tomshardware.com, was added on September 11, 1997, followed by additional language versions over time, including German, Japanese, Polish, French, Chinese, Italian, Turkish and others — some operated by Tom’s Guides Publishing, Inc., and others based on franchise agreements.
This book is badly organized. For starters much of it points to information in prior books of the author. The author also commits an entire chapter describing how the book is laid out. Also the author repeatedly states that he won't waste time trying to convince you that affiliate marketing is a good idea and then spends several pages arguing that it's a good idea. The examples given are also weak. The only reason I'm giving this 3 stars is because it did provide some useful information, though I had to wade through 3 chapters first before finding any. I finally gave up on this book and gave a cheaper one a try. It turned out to be much better. If you're in the market for a digital book on this topic try Affiliate Programs: How to Make Money Online with Other People's Products by Joel Comm instead. It gives you just enough info to get you going in the right direction and is a much better value. For example, if I talk about how cool a product is, and then you find out that I’m an affiliate for them, wouldn’t you as a conscientious observer become skeptical as to whether my information is biased, if perhaps I’m only saying how cool something is because I can get paid for it? Wouldn’t that make you question my integrity with other things I say as well?
Designing and developing your blog / niche site – When it comes to themes and designing your blog/website, if you want to go big, and get real pro right out of the gate, I suggest you look into the Rainmaker Platform, which is what THIS website is built with. To keep things a little more simple, once you’ve got started with Bluehost, you can visit StudioPress to get your site looking pretty.
Another way to think about an affiliate marketing niche is as a group of people with a similar interest or problem. This is good way to think of niches for marketing, as you’ll be offering products to satisfy their passions or needs. There’s a balance between choosing an affiliate marketing niche you’ll be able to compete in and there being enough market size for you to generate good profits. If you choose a market with just a few thousand people, it could be very hard to make enough money to justify the work required to reach them.
Since you’re essentially a freelancer, you get ultimate independence in setting your own goals, redirecting your path when you feel so inclined, choosing the products that interest you, and even determining your own hours. This convenience means you can diversify your portfolio if you like or focus solely on simple and straightforward campaigns. You’ll also be free from company restrictions and regulations as well as ill-performing teams. Nothing worse than Debt. The one thing that takes from you all of your financial freedom. You spend the younger years of your life investing in a great education. Hoping that in the future you can have a great career that pays really well. But instead, you find yourself stuck, feeling as though you will be paying off your education debt for the rest of your life.
If you have built up an email list, you could also promote your affiliate offers via email promotions. Just make sure you build up a relationship with your audience first instead of going for the hard sell straightaway. The emails you send out must contain your affiliate links to products so when your audience click through. the sale is attributed to you. This is one of my favorite Amazon Affiliate Websites because it’s so freaking cool! These guys gather up the coolest gadgets, gifts, tech and oddities from Amazon and around the web to showcase on their website. These are gag gifts and fun gadgets people love to buy. They likely use a SEO tool like SEMrush to find great blog post ideas. This site uncovers the cool, often hidden, things of the internet and all you have to do is click on one of the Amazon Affiliate links to buy it from the Amazon store. ThisIsWhyIAmBroke works with more than just Amazon, but it’s one of their biggest revenue sources. It’s entirely possible to create a website just like this.
Can you make money with affiliate marketing? The short answer is yes, affiliate programs can earn a extra money and even a full-time income from home. The long answer is a little more complicated. Like any home income venture, success comes not so much from what you choose to do to make money, but whether or not you do what needs to be done correctly and consistently.
After successfully launching their Australian affiliate program with Rakuten Marketing, Cotton ON utilized their affiliate program as a key channel for their strategy to expand to new international markets. Through the Cotton ON Australia program, publisher partnerships in the key markets of Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore are accessed, with a bespoke US affiliate program being managed by local US account managers.

Carly also published an all-encompassing Pinterest Strategies eBook for bloggers who wish to see big results and gain traffic from Pinterest. Affiliate marketing will only work when you have some traffic to your blog. So if you have yet to cross that threshold, I highly recommend Carly’s affordable resource. She used this strategy to grow her blog traffic to 200,000 visitors per month from Pinterest alone!

As a result of their rapid growth, they've also got a stellar link profile. It's a situation where because they rank well, they get more links, and the more links they get, the better all of their articles rank. There are a number of reasons why this site has taken off, but overall it's an excellent site that has built a strong foundation on nothing but organic traffic. I have no idea what strategy they used initially to get links and start getting the exposure that they did, but the growth that this site has experienced is extremely impressive to say the least. I'd estimate their traffic figures to be between six and seven figures on a monthly basis.
One of the main reasons why most newbie affiliate marketers give up after 3 months is the fact that they can’t build up traffic to their affiliate website. It’s a thorn in most marketers’ sides, but one that can be easily resolved if you put the effort in. Below I have covered a few areas that will get you good targeted traffic to your affiliate deals.
He put only very little effort on building this site but it makes him thousands of dollars every year “on autopilot” (=passive income). I think creating this site took only like a few workweeks in total. We can certainly say it was success. You can take a look at the process how Jay built the site on Wealthy Affiliate live training archive. (I’ll leave a link below.) We've partnered with The Foundation for Learning and Youth Travel Education (FLYTE), a nonprofit organization that empowers youth living in underserved communities through transformative travel experiences. FLYTE teaches that we are more alike than we realize. By bridging the gap between fear and understanding, FLYTE empowers future generations by connecting them to the world.

Another way to check whether or not your niche is something that you can promote affiliate offers on is actually to look at Google AdWords and check out the cost-per-click for keywords related to the niche that you might want to enter. Head over to Google AdWords, log in, and under Tools and Analysis, choose Keyword Planner. You want to click on Search For New Keyword Ad Group Ideas and enter a few keywords related to your niche: Travel, traveling, things like that. Click on Get Ideas, then click on Keyword Ideas and pay attention to the suggested bid. The suggested bid is basically how much an AdWords advertiser pays for one click in AdWords for people searching for this particular keyword.

And how much you make can fluctuate wildly. I still have months where I might only make a few dollars, if that. You also need to factor in that many brands only pay affiliates once you’ve earned a certain amount, say $25. On the plus side, it takes next to no effort to include affiliate links, and if you’re really strategic about it and have reasonable traffic, you could potentially make a decent amount, certainly more than me. Adam Riemer is an Affiliate Veteran and leading Outsourced Affiliate Manager. He builds content sites as an Affiliate and the programs he manages only works with content sites and value adding partners. His company is known for removing adware, trademark bidders and coupon sites that poach from merchants and other Affiliates by ranking for url + coupons and then growing a value adding program ethically and responsibly. Follow Adam on Twitter at @rollerblader. NomadicMatt.com is similar to MuscleForLife.com in the fact that Matt Kepnes took his passion and turned it into a legitimate business. If you plan on starting a site in the travel niche, Nomadic Matt's blog is probably a resource you'll be taking a look at pretty frequently when you are analyzing your content. He has capitalized on his traffic by self-publishing a number of books. He's gained credibility by several media appearances, which I'm sure helps his book sales, and helps him get really high-quality and Natural Links.
Although it has a dynamic and well-designed website, PeerFly has a limited range of offers at any given time (around 8,000). On the upside, it does offer good commission/payout rates, lots of FAQs and educational information, and regular contests and reward programs that can substantially increase your bottom line. Based on online customer reviews, Peerfly enjoys a very high reputation amongst participating affiliates. Prior to confirming this choice, they had chosen to create a site on website/blog design for non-design people, which would have done 10 times better I think. But since this topic caused a bit of an uproar within the comments section, as people argued this was just another website about making money online (or at least overlapped too much), they had to ditch it. Continue Reading >

Many affiliate marketers use paid advertising to generate additional traffic to their site and drive more sales. Paid advertising on social media is often a good place to start, as these networks tend to be more affordable.You may also want to consider taking out inexpensive banner ads on small niche sites. Depending on your niche, Google AdWords could also be a good option to drive some paid traffic to your site.

By putting in more time and effort upfront, you increase your chances of finding a profitble niche. I don't 100% buy into the "choose something you are passionate about" mantra, sure it may help you if you have issues with focus, however if you are serious about affiliate marketing then you need to treat it like a real business and be prepared to put in the time and effort.

Just imagine how much you could start investing if you owned or two of these niche sites. The thing is, it’s completely do-able. I have the skills (most people do) to create something like this. I am so freaking pumped to start my next niche website! I’m using these lessons learned to start my keyword research now. I’ll follow up on my progress in the upcoming blog posts. I really hope this helps you as much as it did me. It’s really inspirational to see how others are making additional income online with niche websites!

So combine a review site and something people everyone loves, like babies. Imagine all the confusion new parents have when they bring a new baby into the world. What do they do, what do they need, what is the best? BabyGearLab solves that by reviewing baby stuff and helping parents understand it and buy it. This site has been around since 2011 helping parents through the impossible decisions of what is best for your baby. This affiliate will probably send out a lesson from the mini-course every day or every couple of days for a set period of time. The lessons will direct the reader back to the website so that he or she can be exposed to more promotions and affiliate ads in addition to their “free lessons”. Then, once the reader has received all the free lessons, they will likely be added to the affiliate’s “regular” newsletter list. Unless they unsubscribe they will receive occasional news or promotions from the affiliate but less frequently than with the lessons. If this affiliate is smart he will continue to provide good content to his list and not just use it as a vehicle for pushing affiliate products. You need to give your readers good reasons to open your emails and not just send them straight to the trash folder.
But I think the biggest deciding factor in this, goes back to the site as a whole and all of the other posts. Are the genuine? Is the blogger constantly trying to push products? I’d like to think I’ve been doing this long enough that my audience knows I’m not out to make a quick buck – and I think even relatively new bloggers can prove this based on their other content. I'd say the content on this site is a little less “in-depth” when comparing it to LearnHowToBecome.org, but the content is still very good (hence the reason a 600 word article is ranking well for a high volume keyword). While it's difficult to judge based on traffic estimates, I would make a guess that LawyerEdu.org is making over $10k per month based on lead sales. If you remember, CPA/Lead sale programs can yield up to $50 or more per lead, and some professions and/or schools pay even more for them. Overall this site doesn't have a ton of content, but the content it does have is super informative and hyper focused on one line of work. It also has an excellent link profile, which is another reason it's ranking well.

On your path to become an affiliate marketer, it isn’t always going to be an easy job. A lot of time and hard work must be dedicated to promoting relevant offers and helping the targeted audience. Some of the pros, however, are never having to create products, just drive the traffic to someone else’s products and earn money while not worrying about any customer support.

LinkConnector has struggled to stand out from the pack but nonetheless has managed to sign some exclusive deals with big name brands, including Writer’s Digest, the Disney Store, Ironman, Hats.com, and Everly. Their strictly controlled screening process for both merchants/advertisers and affiliates/publishers means that you can always rely on the quality of products on offer.

That's right, my blog NichePursuits.com is a successful Affiliate website! While I don't make as much as some other bloggers, it's been my passion and my voice that lends itself to my brands and to my software product businesses that I know my readers can use. While I don't publicly reveal the income I make from my businesses, you can go back and see from my prior income reports exactly how much NichePursuits makes each month. My income from NichePursuits.com is only a portion of my online income because of all my other businesses I'm a part of.

“Think of this as the way you promote advertisers on your site, or your general business model. Advertisers may view, sort, and download publishers by their classification,” reads its website. “In the world of affiliate marketing, an advertiser can be a company selling a product like electronics, airline tickets, clothing or car parts, or an advertiser could also be an insurance company selling policies. The most important thing to remember is that you are an advertiser if you are ready to pay other people to help you sell and promote your business.” Posted in For Reviewers, Reviewer Tips and tagged affiliate links, affiliate links book bloggers, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing book bloggers, amazon associates, blogging tips, book blog, book blogging tips, book depository affiliate, booktopia affiliate, grammarly affiliate, how much can I make through affiliate marketing, make money affiliate links, make money affiliate marketing, monetise blog. Bookmark the permalink. I believe you need a disclaimer if you include Amazon affiliate links on your site, but you only require a privacy policy if you also collect data (name, email address, etc.) from your readers. Here’s a link that may help: https://termsfeed.com/blog/disclaimer-amazon-associates/ Partnering with Book Depository has been a good experience for me. It’s really easy to create links and their affiliate portal is very user friendly.
BabyGearLab.com is basically the baby's gear version of OutdoorGearLab.com. It has the same theme and site structure as OutDoorGearLab.com. While it doesn't express that this site is owned by the same people, it's probably operated by the same group. The structure is very similar and the focus is definitely Amazon Affiliate income for this site. The cool thing about this site is that they actually have some really good reviews and content. It's similar to TheWireCutter.com – but niched down, which is a popular route that most sites are going these days.
FriendFinder is an adult-friendly network of dating websites that has a terrific affiliate marketing program, both in terms of customer service and commission rates. Because they rely heavily on affiliates to recruit new members, they treat their affiliates like true business partners. They have a solid reputation for payment and security, and have frequent special offers. Checking into your affiliate account at FriendFinder is always a fun experience, and often a profitable one. That's right, my blog NichePursuits.com is a successful Affiliate website! While I don't make as much as some other bloggers, it's been my passion and my voice that lends itself to my brands and to my software product businesses that I know my readers can use. While I don't publicly reveal the income I make from my businesses, you can go back and see from my prior income reports exactly how much NichePursuits makes each month. My income from NichePursuits.com is only a portion of my online income because of all my other businesses I'm a part of.
Internet Retailer Top 500 merchant, JanSport, partnered with Rakuten Marketing on a series of cross-channel marketing campaigns promoting the launch of its Disney Collection, which features popular Disney characters on JanSport apparel and accessories. The campaigns, executed across search, display and affiliate strategies, leveraged valuable consumer data and insights to focus on shoppers who expressed the most interest in Disney themed products.

In the popular ‘An Hour a Day format’, this guide features a detailed, real-world, task-based approach to developing, launching, and managing a successful affiliate marketing program. It explores market research, determining payment models and reporting guidelines, recruiting affiliates, crafting appropriate communications, and much more. Affiliate marketing programs help boost marketing efforts without incurring excessive costs. This ‘Hour a Day guide’ provides everything merchants, business owners, and those charged with managing an affiliate program need to know.

Affiliate marketing is actually really simple; you promote, or even just mention someone else’s product. Then someone comes along, clicks the link you provide, buys the product, and you get a commission on the sale, which is sometimes as high as 75% of the price of the product! Affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool to make large amounts of money, without doing a lot of work. However, while affiliate marketing is an easy concept, you need to know what you are doing. There are specific, proven strategies and steps that you must follow in order to build a successful affiliate marketing business online. Lots of people try affiliate marketing for the first time and fail, because they don’t have the roadmap to follow.
Affiliates work to introduce their visitors to the merchant’s brand. They might write a post about a new product or promotion on the merchant’s site, feature banner ads on their site that drive people to the merchant’s site, or offer visitors a special coupon code. If people come from that affiliate’s site and make a purchase, that affiliate gets paid.

This site is an example of what many sites are doing these days. They are “niched down” into brackets of certain products, and creating an online multimedia experience in the form of an online magazine style site. There's lots of large pictures, some videos, and it looks like a true media property. Chances are that you'd need to hire a designer to get a similar look and feel for your own website if you were to attempt it. From a revenue perspective, this site is more than likely doing more than six figures in total revenue if I had to take a guess, just based on their organic traffic numbers.

What do you think you could honestly sell customers in the hopes that it would improve their day-to-day? For example, maybe you renovate homes and are always looking for the highest-quality paints or most eco-friendly cleaning solutions for bathrooms and kitchens. If you’re already knowledgeable about a market and have interest in it, that’s a great place to start.

I have far better luck when I incorporate affiliate links into the body of a post. For example, if I’m writing about editing tips, I’ll mention that I use Grammarly and include a link like this one so that readers can try it out for themselves. However, you don’t want to be too spammy about this, which is why I think it helps to focus on products that you know and use and think will be of value to your readers.

If the above locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. Utilizing one of the common website correlation methods may provide clues about the affiliate network. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly if a contact method can be located. You now have a fully functional WordPress website with a great hosting company! That wasn't so hard, was it!? From this point on, your main task is to publish as much content as possible. This site has tons of tutorials and articles on how to grow your affilaite marketing business, but in order for you to fully understand how to publish content and make money with your affiliate marketing blog, check out this article. Best of luck to you as you grow your business! :) Want even more help? Check out this incredible affiliate marketer training program and community of people growing an affiliate business just like you!
Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond two-tier resemble multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing but are different: Multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing associations tend to have more complex commission requirements/qualifications than standard affiliate programs.[citation needed]

Taking the financial analysis a stage further, think about the potential profits you can make from each affiliate sale. You’ll have to sell hundreds of low priced items to make a reasonable return, and it may be better to promote premium products where one sale could generate hundreds of dollars. For example, an ebook on cat breeding tips might generate five dollars in commission for each sale. An ebook detailing a profitable gambling system might sell for ten times more and net you much higher commissions.

The other competition, the one we want low, is the competition of the top 10 sites ranking in Google for that keyword. When we say low SERP Competition, it menas we are addressing the strength of the top 10 and thats made up of a series of factors which Spencer mentioned will be addressed in detail in future posts. But to name a few: Title, backlinks to page, and number of links to the ranking page. Hope that helps 🙂 This book is written in a question-and-answer format, which makes it especially simple for the affiliate marketing beginner. I found myself nodding right along with the list of questions, presented in the table of contents—it’s comforting to see the questions that you’re asking yourself laid out for you. Now you know that you’re not the only one wondering these things. Cost per click was more common in the early days of affiliate marketing but has diminished in use over time due to click fraud issues very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising programs are not considered in the statistic pertaining to the diminished use of cost per click, as it is uncertain if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing.
We've partnered with The Foundation for Learning and Youth Travel Education (FLYTE), a nonprofit organization that empowers youth living in underserved communities through transformative travel experiences. FLYTE teaches that we are more alike than we realize. By bridging the gap between fear and understanding, FLYTE empowers future generations by connecting them to the world. SEO 2016 & Beyond :: Search engine optimization will never be the same again, this book taught me more about SEO and content creation in the 30 minutes it took me to read it then any other piece of information out there. Learn how to properly write content, how to properly build back links, and how to properly build a website so it will rank the best it can in Google, all for $3.99. Get the Book!
Finding a good nich is a bit of a process. You can’t just choose a niche on a whim. Instead, you need to have specific research tools so that you know what people are searching for in search engines, along with how much competition there is for your niche. If you want to get into more advanced training, including all the tools you’ll need to perform niche research, I highly recommend this training program. When there are multiple affiliates involved in one transaction, payment gets much more complicated. Sometimes it’s even possible for affiliates to jump in at the last minute and claim commissions for customers brought in by other affiliates. Successful programs use multi-channel attribution to ensure the affiliates that create the most value get paid the most.
VigLink works a bit differently than other affiliate programs in that it is specifically designed for bloggers. Instead of affiliates picking and choosing which merchants to work with, VigLink uses dynamic links that automatically change to work with merchants that VigLink has determined are offering the highest conversation rates and/or commissions at any given moment. Another one of the highest paying and most popular dating affiliate programs is eHarmony, which is based on the actual earnings that can be made from each referred sale. Up to $188 can be made from a single sale. In general, the members at eHarmony are typically looking to find serious long term relationships, so many of them are willing to pay extra to find similar people.
It offers a modern, real-world, step-by-step guide to researching, launching, managing, and optimizing a successful affiliate marketing program. It covers social media, creating policies, working with feeds, coupons, widgets, and video, creating compelling content, handling partners who are not meeting goals, and much more. ‘Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day’ is the do-it-yourself guide to planning and maintaining a successful affiliate program. Rakuten helps you handle it all. It offers influencer campaign management that aids in influencer recruitment with detailed reporting and campaign insights that can spur users into action. It offers blogger and client networking to help professionals further build up their networks. Rakuten is trusted by brands such as Best Buy, Macy’s, Walmart, ecco, Dialogtech, and more. You have identified and listed your top 10 topical interests and passions. You are now ready to start narrowing down your potential choices. To create your profitable online business, you first need to determine the challenges and problems your target customers are experiencing. More importantly you will then need to determine whether or not you can actually solve them. Here are several ways you can identify the challenges and/or problems in specific niches:

The term niche, when used in the study of business, is used to define a business’s role in a market. Not only does its niche include the environment that a given business operates in, but it also includes the business’s “job” in that environment. A niche may also encompass how the business is monetized, how it interacts with consumers, and also how it interacts with other businesses and influencers within the environment, as well.

Awesome article! This is jam packed with great info. I am just starting a personal finance blog with my fiance and we were a little confused about how to start monetizing. We were initially thinking about using Google AdSense but between this post and another blog I read I am surely convinced that’s not the correct route. I’m really happy you have shared this information because it’s provided an excellent starting point for creating income. Joining our affiliate program is free and easy to get started. Since we have partnered with TUNE by HasOffers, which is a leading provider of affiliate links and program tracking, you will have access to all the tools you need to start earning through your partnership. Once you join the program, you will gain access to custom tracking links, in a single, simple line of code. You can add the pre-coded lines of HTML code to your website for simple creative banner tracking and use your custom tracking URL links by replacing your regular URL links with affiliate text links within your articles and social media posts. If you run into problems or have questions, you can contact your dedicated affiliate management team for support.
Since you’re essentially a freelancer, you get ultimate independence in setting your own goals, redirecting your path when you feel so inclined, choosing the products that interest you, and even determining your own hours. This convenience means you can diversify your portfolio if you like or focus solely on simple and straightforward campaigns. You’ll also be free from company restrictions and regulations as well as ill-performing teams.

One way to do that is to open company in a state that is accepted in Amazon affiliate program. I would suggest Delaware LLC company because is simple to open (little to no restrictions to non-residents) and not expensive to run. Maybe you start building site and once you get some traffic, you open company and setup amazon account. In the worst case scenario, you can still sell the site and earn some money that way.

Continuing with the recipe blog scenario, I'd be comfortable with that because it has tons of potential to market a variety of products: pots, pans, cooking utensils (like particular measuring spoons or spatulas), kitchen appliances (like handheld mixers or crockpots), specialty foods (recommend a specific oil that is hard to find – link to it at Amazon), aprons, cookbooks, cutlery sets, bakeware – this list goes on and on. I love niches like this that have few limitations on what you can market and tons of potential merchants to partner with. I've already discussed how to make money from a blog once you can confirm there are things you can market.

When you’re in the Top 100, they’re going to be more general. Google and YouTube appeal to just about everybody. As you get further down the list, and especially when you get to the second or third page, you’ll notice that they become more and more a niche and they start appealing to certain groups. Fandango is about movies. E! Online is about entertainment. Poll Daddy is a place for polls. Drudge Report is about politics. As you go down the list, you can find more and more niche sites and that’s a place that you can go to get inspiration for your niche. Obviously like I said, you’re not going to copy these sites because these are massive multimillion dollar sites. What they help you do is come up with topic ideas.

The concept of affiliate marketing on the Internet was conceived of, put into practice and patented by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. Launched on the Prodigy Network in 1989, PC Flowers & Gifts remained on the service until 1996. By 1993, PC Flowers & Gifts generated sales in excess of $6 million per year on the Prodigy service. In 1998, PC Flowers and Gifts developed the business model of paying a commission on sales to the Prodigy Network.[4][5]